Islandnet.com Blog

Welcome to our staff blog! This is where we post information that we feel may be of interest to our customers. Anything from hints and tips on how to secure your web site to highlighting cool sites and services that we come across.

Configuring the Blackberry is different to most other devices, from what we can acertain its all done at Blackberry.com and if you want to manually change server settings you need to go in via Blackberry's website using the phone browser:

• Go to mobile.blackberry.com OR to www.blackberry.com/integrate• Scroll down to Communication and then to Email.• Choose the appropriate email set up options.

Because the phone does an auto-setup we are hearing of many users who's Blackberry smartphone's have incorrect server settings and have stopped retrieving mail, the mail servers for us must be mail.islandnet.com as per our knowledge base articles and the above process is the method to go and access those settings.

Wondering how to make your facebook business page pay off? How do you reach your customers??

Here is how Islandnet.com is doing it:

- Use Facebook as your Business, To do this on your page go to the Edit Page and "Use facebook as {pagename}".

- Go and like existing customers and potential customers pages as well as local attractions, event pages artists etc.

- Now continuing to use Facebook as the business page look to see what your customer and locals are posting about on facebook and either add comments or write your own posts. An example Islandnet.com has used before would be:

Customer Spotlight - @Primastrada Pizzeria is offering a 2 for one deal presently, residents of @Victoria BC should check this out http://www.pizzeriaprimastrada.com/

You will notice if you type the above out in facebook as you type past the @P it will list all the likes you have made with your Facebook Page and other potential pages beginning with P and will continue to narrow down suggestions and hopefully list the one you want.

By having the 2 @ mentions I am potentially getting my post viewed by people who like the Pizzeria and Victoria BC which can dramatically increase your target audience and raise brand awareness.

By adding the website URL it will add a little preview box of the site with an image, you can click the title and abstract of this preview box and possibly change the image if the site your featufing had more tham one available to use or choose not to have an image.

Now if you have your Facebook linked to Twitter so it auto tweets these then you can even include #hashtags but thats another blog posting for another day.

If your finding your website is running slow it could be that wp-cron is running on every page load, to avoid this which also causes considerable server load as it runs in every page load you can do this:

1. Edit the wp-config.php and add:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

2. If your an islandnet.com customer you can then using the Cron Job editor at https://hd.islandnet.com/cron-jobs add a CRON entry to run on a set schedule:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

I added * in all entries except for the Min section where I would choose a number, I chose 30 as my site is busy and I need it to run every 30 minutes.

If your not an Islandnet.com customer then ask your host if they have a way to schedule CRON jobs, any good host should allow this.

Your host will be happy to see your doing this and your site will load faster.

I just had a Mac customer called and her computer was slow, I advised a few things including scanning for Virus infection, the response was the Mac store told me not to bother with that... Bad advice - We are seeing an increase in Mac related virus's especially as Mac technology including iPhone and iPad grows in popularity, you should scan for viruses.

ClamXav is a free virus scanner for Mac OS X. It uses the very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end and has the ability to detect both Windows and Mac threats.

An article on kaspersky.com reported a 300% growth to threats in 2011 and thats only the known threats.

PEP is really powerful and you can write custom commands and put them in the Custom Rules sections of the PEP Mailrule Wizard.

Some subject or from address lines are in a foreign character set using a technique called Character Encoding and generally these begin with =? followed by a string of charecters and then ending with ?= which tells the system the character set to use and what to encode, eg:

=?ISO-8859-2?Q?Grzegorz_=A6lusarek?=

To Filter out these you can use:

delete if from contains "=?"delete if subject contains "=?"

or you can amalgamate the test using...:

delete if from,subject contains "=?"

The likelihood that either of these would contain a =? in any other context is unlikely so you should not end up filtering other email but if you do we have the Email Archive from which you can restore your mail going back months and months.

Editing a website, especially a CMS based site thay had a theme and CSS in for example Wordpress it can be hard to do, getting the look and feel you really want is difficult and you may feel restricted to what the theme has to offer. Powerful tools either are included in modern browsers or can be added to them to allow you to inspect elements of a website and play with the look and feel without changing the website code directly.